The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy Bundle

by Stieg Larsson

  “The problem is that a number of sentences were altered in a very subtle way. On page thirty-four there is a paragraph in which Björck appears to suggest that Salander be branded psychotic, so that she will not be believed if anyone should start asking questions about Zalachenko.”

  “And this suggestion is not in the original report.”

  “Precisely. Gunnar Björck’s own report never suggested anything of the kind. Aside from anything else, that would have been against the law. He recommended that she be given the care she quite clearly needed. In Blomkvist’s copy, this was made out to be a conspiracy.”

  “Could I read the original?”

  “Be my guest. But I have to take the report with me when I go. And before you read it, let me direct your attention to the appendix containing the subsequent correspondence between Björck and Teleborian. It is almost entirely fabricated. Here it’s not a matter of subtle alterations, but of gross falsifications.”

  “Falsifications?”

  “I think that’s the only appropriate description. The original shows that Peter Teleborian was assigned by the district court to do a forensic psychiatric examination of Lisbeth Salander. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Salander was twelve years old and had tried to kill her father—it would have been very strange if that shocking event had not resulted in a psychiatric report.”

  “That’s true.”

  “If you had been the prosecutor, I assume that you would have insisted on both social and psychiatric investigations.”

  “Of course.”

  “Even then Teleborian was a well-respected child psychiatrist who had also worked in forensic medicine. He was given the assignment, conducted a normal investigation, and came to the conclusion that the girl was mentally ill. I don’t have to use their technical terms.”

  “No, no …”

  “Teleborian wrote this in a report that he sent to Björck. The report was then given to the district court, which decided that Salander should be cared for at St. Stefan’s. Blomkvist’s version is missing the entire investigation conducted by Teleborian. In its place is an exchange between Björck and Teleborian, which has Björck instructing Teleborian to falsify a mental examination.”

  “And you’re saying that it’s an invention, a forgery?”

  “No question about it.”

  “But who would be interested in creating such a thing?”

  Nyström put down the report and frowned. “Now you’re getting to the heart of the problem.”

  “And the answer is … ?”

  “We don’t know. That’s the question our analytical group is working very hard to answer.”

  “Could it be that Blomkvist made some of it up?”

  Nyström laughed. “That was one of our first thoughts too. But we don’t think so. We incline to the view that the falsification was done a long time ago, presumably more or less simultaneously with the writing of the original report. And that leads to one or two disagreeable conclusions. Whoever did the falsification was extremely well informed. In addition, whoever did it had access to the very typewriter that Björck used.”

  “You mean …”

  “We don’t know where Björck wrote the report. It could have been at his home or at his office or somewhere else altogether. We can imagine two alternatives. Either the person who did the falsification was someone in the psychiatric or forensic medicine department, who for some reason wanted to involve Teleborian in a scandal, or the falsification was done for a completely different purpose by someone inside the Security Police.”

  “For what possible reason?”

  “This happened in 1991. There could have been a Russian agent inside SIS who had picked up Zalachenko’s trail. Right now we’re examining a large number of old personnel files.”

  “But if the GRU had found out it should have leaked years ago.”

  “You’re right. But don’t forget that this was during the period when the Soviet Union was collapsing and the GRU was dissolved. We have no idea what went wrong. Maybe it was a planned operation that was shelved. The GRU were masters of forgery and disinformation.”

  “But why would Soviet military intelligence want to plant such a forgery?”

  “We don’t know that either. But the most obvious purpose would have been to involve the Swedish government in a scandal.”

  Ekström pinched his lip. “So what you’re saying is that the medical assessment of Salander is correct?”

  “Oh yes. Salander is, to put it in colloquial terms, stark raving mad. No doubt about that. The decision to commit her to an institution was absolutely correct.”

  “Toilets?” Eriksson sounded as if she thought Cortez was pulling her leg.

  “Toilets,” Cortez repeated.

  “You want to run a story on toilets? In Millennium?”

  Eriksson could not help laughing. She had observed his ill-concealed enthusiasm when he sauntered into the Friday meeting, and she recognized all the signs of a reporter who had a story in the works.

  “Explain.”

  “It’s really quite simple,” Cortez said. “The biggest industry in Sweden by far is construction. It’s an industry that in practice cannot be outsourced overseas, even if Skanska opens an office in London and stuff like that. No matter what, the houses have to be built in Sweden.”

  “But that’s nothing new.”

  “No, but what is new is that the construction industry is a couple of light-years ahead of all other Swedish industries when it comes to competition and efficiency. If Volvo built cars the same way, the latest model would cost about one million kronor, maybe even two million. For most of industry, cutting prices is the constant challenge. For the construction industry it’s the opposite. The price per square foot keeps going up. The state subsidizes the cost with taxpayers’ money just so that the prices aren’t prohibitive.”

  “Is there a story in that?”

  “Wait. It’s complicated. Let’s say the price curve for hamburgers had been the same since the seventies—so a Big Mac would cost about 150 kronor or more. I don’t want to guess what it would cost with fries and a Coke, but my salary at Millennium might not cover it. How many people around this table would go to McDonald’s and buy a burger for 150 kronor?”

  Nobody said a word.

  “Understandable. But when NCC bangs together some sheet-metal cubes for exclusive rental at Gåshaga on Lidingö, they ask 10 to 12,000 kronor a month for a three-cube apartment. How many of you are paying that much?”

  “I couldn’t afford it,” Nilsson said.

  “No, of course not. But you already live in a one-bedroom apartment by Danvikstull which your father bought for you twenty years ago, and if you were to sell it you’d probably get a million and a half for it. But what does a twenty-year-old who wants to move out of the family home do? He can’t afford to. So he sublets or sub-sublets or lives at home with his mother until he retires.”

  “So where do the toilets come into the picture?” Malm said.

  “I’m getting to that. The question is, why are apartments so fucking expensive? Because the people commissioning the buildings don’t know how to set the price. To put it simply, a developer calls up Skanska, says they want a hundred apartments, and asks what it will cost. Skanska calculates it, comes back and says it’ll cost around 500 million kronor. Which means that the price per square foot will be X kronor and it would cost 10,000 a month if you wanted to move in. But unlike the McDonald’s example, you don’t really have a choice—you have to live somewhere. So you have to pay the going rate.”

  “Henry, dear, please get to the point.”

  “But that is the point. Why should it cost 10,000 a month to live in those crappy dumps in Hammarbyhamnen? Because the construction companies don’t give a damn about keeping prices down. The customer’s going to have to pay, come what may. One of the big costs is building materials. The trade in building materials goes through wholesalers who set their own prices. Since there isn’t any real c
ompetition there, a bathtub retails for 5,000 kronor in Sweden. The same bathtub from the same manufacturer retails for the equivalent of 2,000 kronor in Germany. There is no added cost that can satisfactorily explain the price difference.”

  There was impatient muttering around the table.

  “You can read about a lot of this in a report from the government’s Construction Cost Delegation, which was active in the late nineties. Since then not much has happened. No one is talking to the construction companies about the unreasonable prices. The buyers cheerfully pay what they are told it costs, and in the end the price burden falls on the renters or the taxpayers.”

  “Henry, the toilets?”

  “The little that has changed since the Construction Cost Delegation’s report has happened at the local level, and primarily outside Stockholm. There are buyers who got fed up with the high construction prices. One example is Karlskrona Homes, which builds houses less expensively than anyone else by buying the materials themselves. And Svensk Handel has also gotten into the game. They think that the price of construction materials is absurd, so they’ve been trying to make it easier for companies to buy less expensive products that are equally good. And that led to a little clash at the Construction Fair in Älvsjö last year. Svensk Handel had brought in a man from Thailand who was selling toilets for 500 kronor apiece.”

  “And what happened?”

  “His nearest competitor was a Swedish wholesale outfit called Vitavara Inc., which sells genuine Swedish toilets for 1,700 kronor apiece. And shrewd municipal buyers started to scratch their heads and wonder why they were shelling out 1,700 kronor when they could get a similar toilet from Thailand for 500.”

  “Better quality, maybe,” Karim said.

  “No. The exact same.”

  “Thailand,” Malm said. “That sounds like child labour and stuff like that. Which could explain the low price.”

  “Not so,” Cortez said. “Child labour exists mostly in the textile and souvenir industries in Thailand. And the paedophile industry, of course. The United Nations keeps an eye on child labour, and I’ve checked out this company. They’re a reputable manufacturer. It’s a big, modern, respectable operation producing appliances and plumbing goods.”

  “All right … but we’re talking about low-wage countries, and that means you risk writing an article proposing that Swedish industry should be outbid by Thai industry. Fire the Swedish workers and close the factories here, and import everything from Thailand. You won’t win any points with the Trade Union Confederation.”

  A smile spread over Cortez’s face. He leaned back and looked ridiculously pleased with himself.

  “No again,” he said. “Guess where Vitavara Inc. makes its toilets to sell at 1,700 kronor apiece?”

  Silence fell over the room.

  “Vietnam,” Cortez said.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Eriksson said.

  “They’ve been making toilets there for at least ten years. Swedish workers were already out of that race in the nineties.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “But here comes my point. If you imported directly from the factory in Vietnam, the price would be in the order of 390 kronor. Guess how you can explain the price difference between Thailand and Vietnam?”

  “Don’t tell me that—”

  “Oh yes. Vitavara Inc. subcontracts the work to an outfit called Fong Soo Industries. They’re on the UN list of companies that use child labour—at least they were in an investigation from 2001. But the majority of the workers are convicts.”

  Eriksson burst out laughing. “This is great. This is really great. I’m sure you’re going to be a journalist when you grow up. How fast can you have the story ready?”

  “Two weeks. I have a lot of international trade stuff to check out. And then we need a bad guy for the story, so I’m going to see who owns Vitavara Inc.”

  “Then we could run it in the June issue?”

  “No problem.”

  Inspector Bublanski listened to Prosecutor Ekström without expression. The meeting had lasted forty minutes, and Bublanski was feeling an intense desire to reach out and grab the copy of The Law of the Swedish Kingdom that lay on the edge of Ekström’s desk and ram it down the prosecutor’s throat. He wondered what would happen if he acted on his impulse. There would certainly be headlines in the evening papers, and it would probably result in an assault charge. He pushed the thought away. The whole point of the socialized human being was to not give in to that sort of impulse, regardless of how belligerently an opponent might behave. Of course it was usually after somebody had given in to such impulses that Inspector Bublanski was called in.

  “I take it we’re in agreement,” Ekström said.

  “No, we are not in agreement,” Bublanski said, getting to his feet. “But you’re the leader of the preliminary investigation.”

  He muttered to himself as he turned down the hall to his office, summoning Andersson and Modig as he went. They were the only colleagues available to him that afternoon, as Holmberg had regrettably opted to take a two-week vacation.

  “My office,” Bublanski said. “Bring some coffee.”

  After they settled in, Bublanski looked at the notes from his meeting with Ekström.

  “As the situation stands, our preliminary investigation leader has dropped all charges against Lisbeth Salander relating to the murders for which she was being sought. She is no longer part of the preliminary investigation as far as we’re concerned.”

  “That can be considered a step forward, at any rate,” Modig said.

  Andersson, as usual, said nothing.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Bublanski said. “Salander is still suspected in connection with the events at Stallarholmen and Gosseberga. But we’re no longer involved with those investigations. We have to concentrate on finding Niedermann and working on the graves in the woods at Nykvarn. On the other hand, it’s now clear that Ekström is going to bring charges against Salander. The case has been transferred to Stockholm, and an entirely new investigation has been set up for the purpose.”

  “Oh, really?” Modig said.

  “And who do you think is going to investigate Salander?” Bublanski said.

  “I’m fearing the worst.”

  “Hans Faste is back on duty, and he’s going to assist Ekström.”

  “That’s insane. Faste is grossly unsuited to investigate anything at all to do with Salander.”

  “I know that. But Ekström has a good argument. Faste has been out on sick leave, and this would be the perfect, simple case for him to focus on.”

  Silence.

  “The long and the short of it is that we’re to hand over all our material on Salander to him this afternoon.”

  “And this story about Gunnar Björck and Säpo and the 1991 report. …”

  “ … is going to be handled by Faste and Ekström.”

  “I don’t like this,” Modig said.

  “Nor do I. But Ekström’s the boss, and he has backing from higher up in the bureaucracy. In other words, our job is still to find the killer. Curt, what’s the situation?”

  Andersson shook his head. “Niedermann seems to have been swallowed up by the earth. I have to admit that in all my years on the force I’ve never seen anything like it. We haven’t had any tip-offs, and we don’t have a single informer who knows him or has any idea where he might be.”

  “That sounds fishy,” Modig said. “But he’s being sought for the police murder in Gosseberga, for aggravated assault on another officer, for the attempted murder of Salander, and for the aggravated kidnapping and assault of the dental hygienist Anita Kaspersson, as well as for the murders of Svensson and Johansson. In every instance there’s good forensic evidence.”

  “That helps a bit, at least. How’s it going with the case of Svavelsjö MC’s treasurer?”

  “Viktor Göransson—and his girlfriend, Lena Nygren. We have forensic evidence that ties Niedermann to the scene. Fingerprints and DNA
from Göransson’s body. Niedermann must have bloodied his knuckles pretty badly during the beating.”

  “Anything new on Svavelsjö MC?”

  “Nieminen has taken over as club president while Lundin remains in custody, awaiting trial for the kidnapping of Miriam Wu. There’s a whisper that Nieminen has offered a big reward to anyone who can provide information on Niedermann’s whereabouts.”

  “If the entire underworld is looking for him, it’s even stranger that he hasn’t been found. What about Göransson’s car?”

  “Since we found Kaspersson’s car at Göransson’s place, we’re sure that Niedermann switched vehicles. But we have no trace of the car he took.”

  “So we have to ask ourselves, one, is Niedermann still hiding out somewhere in Sweden? Two, if so, with whom? Three, is he out of the country? What do we think?”

  “We have nothing to indicate that he’s left the country, but really that seems his most logical course.”

  “Where did he ditch the car?”

  Modig and Andersson shook their heads. Nine times out of ten, police work was uncomplicated when it came to looking for one specific individual. It was about initiating a logical sequence of inquiries. Who were his friends? Who had he been in prison with? Where did his girlfriend live? Who did he drink with? In what area was his mobile last used? Where was his vehicle? At the end of that sequence the fugitive would generally be found.

  The problem with Niedermann was that he had no friends, no girlfriend, and no listed mobile, and he had never been in prison.

  The inquiries had concentrated on finding Göransson’s car, which Niedermann was presumed to be using. They had expected the car to turn up in a matter of days, probably in some parking lot in Stockholm. But there was still no sign of it.

  “If he’s out of the country, where would he be?”

  “He’s a German citizen, so the obvious thing would be for him to head for Germany.”

  “He seems not to have had any contact with his old friends in Hamburg.”

  Andersson waved his hand. “If his plan was to go to Germany, why would he drive to Stockholm? Shouldn’t he have made for Malmö and the bridge to Copenhagen, or for one of the ferries?”